And this year was no exception, with over 600 different events taking place in 40 countries celebrating Europe's linguistic diversity and lifelong language learning. In Poland, the Foreign Languages Department of Wroclaw University of Technology staged an IATEFL Conference, which brought together teachers and course book authors to exchange ideas and experience. A joint art exhibition, entitled We in Europe, took place in both Człuchów and Constance, Germany, among many other events happening simultaneously all over the country.

The giant disused power station at Battersea on the south bank of the River Thames in London has long been a symbol of the decline of the city's main waterway. Compared to the elegantly designed River Seine in Paris and the magnificent canals of Venice, the Thames has often seemed a bit of an industrial mess.

This image is being transformed, however, by a series of exciting public projects aimed at making the river a place to be visited and not just crossed to get to work and back home.

A hundred years ago there were no movies and there was nothing in Hollywood. Today the film industry is worth billions of dollars and Hollywood is one of the most famous places on the planet. How did it happen?

Those who read me, know my conviction that the world ... rests on a few very simple ideas ... It rests, notably ... on the idea of Fidelity." So wrote Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), the Polish-born writer whose novels in the English language have come to be regarded as some of the greatest in English literature. Born in what is now the Ukraine, Conrad grew up with the name Konrad Korzeniowski, only changing it to be easier for English tongues to pronounce. At the age of seventeen he went away to sea, and for the next twenty years the naval life with all its hardships was to be his world.

Terry Pratchett is one of the world's most successful novelists. He was born in Beaconsfield, England in 1948. At the tender age of 13, Terry wrote and published his first short story, The Hades Business. His first full-length novel, The Carpet People was published in 1971. Since then, Terry Pratchett has sold around 30 million books worldwide and is best known for his Discworld series.

The international blockbuster Chicago won 6 Oscars at the Academy Awards ceremony on March 23. The musical, set in 1926, is a tale of obsession with fame and celebrity during the period of Prohibition. But what was Chicago really like at that time? Steve DeBretto, who grew up in the Windy City, writes that the real characters and stories of Chicago are even more fascinating than the musical.